Dana
Priest of the Washington Post won her Pulitzer Prize, but then the
roof fell in on her. With the allegation that a key source for her
“secret prisons” story was a partisan anti-Bush political operative
in the agency, Mary O. McCarthy, the Sweetness
& Light website has led the way in highlighting information about
Priest’s husband, left-wing activist William Goodfellow. He is the
executive director of the Center for International Policy (CIP), which
is dedicated to advancing a “liberal internationalist agenda.” The
CIP boasts that Goodfellow “took up the fight” against President Bush’s
nomination of John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations. The
group’s’ summer 2005 newsletter urges freedom of travel to communist
Cuba, a “pragmatic approach” to communist North Korea, and the defeat
of a plan to assist the government of Colombia in its war with Marxist
terrorists.

Goodfellow,
of course, is not the issue. Whether she agrees with her husband or
not, the main point is that there’s no reason to believe the essence
of Priest’s “secret prisons” story was true. And that’s why her prize
ought to be returned.

The
Post is desperate to avoid discussing this. Howard Kurtz, media reporter
for the Post, declared during an on-line
discussion of the controversy on April 24 that “…the thing that
some critics [of Priest] are missing is that the story was true.”
He’s taking the party line. This has to remain the party line because
if the story is not true, there’s absolutely no justification for
Priest retaining the Pulitzer. The Post fears that it may have to
give back the award, in the same way it returned the Pulitzer awarded
to reporter Janet Cooke for a story about a child heroin addict who
turned out not to exist. Kurtz, being someone who is supposed to cover
his own paper objectively, ignores the evidence and should know better.
His cover-up suggests a major crisis is enveloping the paper, on the
eve of the Post’s May 11 annual shareholders meeting.

The
evidence is that Dick Marty, on behalf of the Council of Europe, after
a major investigation, declared
that “At this stage of the investigations, there is no formal, irrefutable
evidence of the existence of secret CIA detention centers” in Europe.
Gijs de Vries, the counterterrorism chief of the European Union, has
said that he had not been able to prove that secret CIA prisons existed
in Europe. “We’ve heard all kinds of allegations,” he said. “It does
not appear to be proven beyond reasonable doubt.” I could find no
reference to the Vries findings in the Post.

So
the best defense of the Priest story is that, despite the evidence
to the contrary, it may someday turn out to be true. Is this enough
to justify a Pulitzer? If so, the standards of journalism have declined
dramatically.

In
light of the McCarthy firing, however, the common sense question becomes:
how could such a story, reportedly provided by a CIA source with access
to classified information, be false? The answer is that the story
was embellished, either by Priest or her “sources.” McCarthy, even
if she was a source, had no control over the final product. The bold
but misleading headline over the Priest article was “CIA Holds Terror
Suspects in Secret Prisons,” but the names of particular countries
allegedly assisting the U.S. were withheld because of official concern
over the damage that could be done to U.S. foreign policy. However,
some countries were subsequently named by certain U.S. liberal “human
rights” groups—the kinds of groups on the same side of the political
spectrum as William Goodfellow’s Center for International Policy.

Using
various sensational rhetorical formulations, Priest’s tabloid treatment
of the controversy included calling it a “covert prison system,” a
“hidden global internment network,” and a “secret detention system.”
Later in the article, she did use the phrase, “secret prisons,” to
refer to where terrorists may have been held. She also referred to
the CIA using “a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe,” a clear attempt
to imply that the U.S. had established a system of gulags.

The
sensationalist nature of the piece may help explain why McCarthy is
denying through intermediaries that she was the source of the story.
Perhaps she does not want to be associated with a flawed product.
Being the alleged source of the story would not only expose her to
criminal prosecution over illegally disclosing classified information,
it would make it look as if she was dispensing disinformation, since
the “secret prisons” have not been proven to exist. McCarthy made
the denial through her friend, former Clinton aide Rand Beers, in
a just-released Newsweek story by Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff
(Newsweek is a Washington Post property), and then in a R. Jeffrey
Smith and Dafna Linzer story in the Post itself on April 25. This
time, the denial was made through Ty Cobb, McCarthy’s lawyer in the
Washington office of Hogan & Hartson.

It
may have been the case that CIA flights with suspected terrorists
landed in some foreign countries or that terrorists were briefly detained
on foreign soil. But this doesn’t constitute a network of “secret
prisons,” as alleged by Dana Priest. It does explain why the CIA would
want to kill the story, since countries that worked with the U.S.
on such a program, whatever its exact nature, would not want to be
named publicly. Naming these countries would expose them to terrorist
retaliation and violence. While Priest and the Post went along with
the government’s request to leave out the names of certain countries,
she failed to get the basic facts correct. It is the nature of disinformation
that a false story can be more damaging than a true one.

Here’s
how the “sources” in the Priest article were described:

U.S. and foreign officials

current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three
continents

one former senior intelligence officer

senior U.S. officials

several former and current intelligence officials and other U.S.
government officials.

sources

current and former intelligence officers and two other U.S. government
officials.

some former and current intelligence officials

one intelligence official

the intelligence official

After
McCarthy was fired and reported to have been one of Priest’s sources,
the Post reporter “declined to comment,” her paper said. It is noteworthy
that Priest did not rule out McCarthy as a source of the “secret prisons”
story.

But
in deciding whether the Priest story deserved an award, the Pulitzer
Prize Board should have examined it thoroughly. Another controversial
part of the article was the claim that “…the revelations of widespread
prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. military—which
operates under published rules and transparent oversight of Congress—have
increased concern among lawmakers, foreign governments and human rights
groups about the opaque CIA system.”

However,
there is no evidence of “widespread prisoner abuse in Afghanistan
and Iraq by the U.S. military.” That is another gross exaggeration.

Senator
Joseph Lieberman points out that abuse cases constitute “about one-tenth
of 1 percent of the detainees…” and that, in the overwhelming majority
of cases, detainees “have been treated within the standards that we
in America would want detainees to be treated.”

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Priest
did not deserve any prize and her story was so flawed that it should
never have been published, let alone nominated for a Pulitzer. That
is why Washington Post chairman Donald E. Graham should give back
the award and why Priest should resign from the paper.

Cliff Kincaid, a veteran journalist and media
critic, Cliff concentrated in journalism and communications at the University
of Toledo, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Cliff has written or co-authored nine books on
media and cultural affairs and foreign policy issues.

Cliff has appeared on Hannity & Colmes, The O’Reilly
Factor, Crossfire and has been published in the Washington Post, Washington
Times, Chronicles, Human Events and Insight.
Web Site: www.AIM.org
E-Mail: kincaid@comcast.net

It
may have been the case that CIA flights with suspected terrorists landed
in some foreign countries or that terrorists were briefly detained on
foreign soil. But this doesn’t constitute a network of “secret prisons,”
as alleged by Dana Priest.